Words by Matt Jarvis
If literature has Roald Dahl, it could be that gaming has Jerry Hawthorne.
The designer’s Mice & Mystics was a dungeon crawler unlike any other, combining the adventuring and dice-throwing of Dungeons & Dragons and HeroQuest with the in-depth story of a children’s novel, contained in its tome of narrative directions that doubled as a kind of artificial paper game master. Players weren’t just characters; they were readers, both passively discovering and actively controlling the action and plot during each of the game’s scenarios, fittingly referred to as ‘chapters’.